“Given Republicans’ narrow 222-person majority, they can’t really pass much if they lose any more than five votes in their own conference. Since conservatives have been vocal about their commitment to blocking key bills, like an increase to the debt ceiling, in order to get the spending cuts they want, Republicans will likely need Democratic votes to keep essential government functions and services running if they want to do so.
Additionally, given the number of Freedom Caucus members added to the House Rules Committee, Democrats could theoretically join with the conservatives on the panel to block or slow bills favored by House GOP Leadership.
The situation gives Democrats more leverage to put forth their own demands, if Republican leadership is actually interested in getting anything done. Of course, there’s a high chance that they aren’t”
…
“In 2011 and 2014, Republican House Speaker John Boehner needed Democratic votes to approve spending bills to fund the government”
…
“McCarthy’s concessions included adding multiple members of the Freedom Caucus to the Rules Committee, which plays a key role in deciding what bills make it to the floor and what amendments get considered. Should three ultraconservative Republicans be added to that committee, something McCarthy agreed to, they’d be able to delay bills and push more extreme versions of policies.
That’s led some Democrats to worry these changes will empower Republicans’ conservative flank to use the panel for obstruction. “We have a small faction basically holding Congress hostage,” Scanlon says. “Many of the rules changes that are being proposed by this kind of extreme faction have the same goal.”
Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA), a member of the Rules Committee, notes that conservatives could gum up the process on bills by forcing debate on amendments, whether or not they are germane to the legislation at hand. “It’s impossible to legislate from that perspective,” she said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/end-netflix-ization-tv-beginning-095100138.html
“The Biden administration helped expand access to medication abortion last week, with the US Food and Drug Administration finalizing a rule to make the pills more readily available in pharmacies. But this effort to help patients get pills to end a pregnancy could be dwarfed by a major push to restrict access to the medication from anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies.
As lawmakers head back to state legislatures this month, many for the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, Republicans face new pressure to restrict access to the combination of abortion-inducing drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, used typically within the first 10 to 12 weeks of a pregnancy. Medication abortion has become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to its safety record, its lower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy.
Restricting access to the pills is not a new goal for the anti-abortion movement; the Guttmacher Institute tracked 118 medication abortion restrictions introduced last year across 22 states, and many conservative states already have laws on the books for dispensing the drugs that go beyond what the FDA requires and what leading health organizations recommend.
But efforts to crack down on abortion pills have taken on new urgency since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision. More women are finding ways to bypass abortion bans through organizations like Aid Access in Europe, pill suppliers from Mexico, and methods like mail forwarding from states where abortion is legal. While a study from the Society of Family Planning estimated that legal abortions nationwide declined by more than 10,000 in the two months following the Supreme Court’s decision, some or many of those abortions may have been replaced by pills women privately obtained and researchers couldn’t count.
“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Washington Post in December. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”
Some of the restrictions on medication abortion leaders are considering extend well beyond those pursued by lawmakers in previous years, when their focus was generally on banning telemedicine and adding more requirements for dispensing pills in person, like mandatory ultrasounds, waiting periods, and visits with doctors.
Anti-abortion activists are exploring new strategies, such as laws to ban websites like Aid Access and Plan C and laws to make health care providers newly liable for disposing of aborted fetal tissue. In a federal lawsuit filed in November, one religious conservative group has challenged the FDA’s approval of mifepristone writ large, alleging the agency abused its authority 23 years ago in authorizing the drug at all.
Some lawmakers are looking to test the limits of their extraterritorial powers, exploring how and whether they could punish a resident for getting an out-of-state abortion, or retaliate against providers in other states who facilitate them.
“Anti-abortion advocates are throwing the kitchen sink in an attempt to see what might work,” said Jenny Ma, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “That’s the same playbook the anti-abortion movement had before Dobbs … but they’ve become emboldened.””
“White House lawyers initially found sensitive documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington — where Biden kept a personal office — on Nov. 2, a day before the midterm elections, and notified the Justice Department. On Dec. 20, Biden’s team notified the department of a second batch of documents in Biden’s Wilmington garage. On Thursday, they informed the department of another document found in Biden’s house. Garland was briefed on the investigation on Jan. 5.”
…
“there are significant differences in the timeline of the Trump-related documents and those found at Biden’s office and home. The National Archives discovered the presence of records with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago in January 2022, after a protracted effort to reclaim presidential records that Trump had warehoused at his estate since leaving office. Trump sent an initial batch of 15 boxes back to the archive that month.
After discovering the material marked classified, the Archives forwarded the matter to the Justice Department, which soon subpoenaed Trump’s presidential office for all other documents with classified markings. The department also subpoenaed security footage to review the handling of the documents, which were kept in a storage room and Trump’s personal office.
But Justice Department investigators said evidence they collected showed that even after the subpoena, Trump’s team had not turned over everything in their possession — even as the ex-president’s aides presented the department with a signed attestation that all subpoenaed documents had been turned over. The FBI discovered another trove of sensitive records after executing a search at Trump’s estate in August, including some that he kept in his personal office.
Biden’s team, by contrast, has repeatedly emphasized its proactive approach to the discovery of the records. In two statements, White House lawyer Richard Sauber said Biden’s own team discovered the documents, immediately alerted the Archives and the Justice Department and returned the records. Similarly, they conducted additional searches and have pledged to cooperate with department investigators.
Trump sued last year to demand the return of documents seized by the FBI, a battle that reached the Supreme Court, only to result in a sharp rejection of his effort to sideline the Justice Department investigation. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have demanded assessments of the potential damage to national security caused by the handling of the documents.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/14/more-documents-found-at-bidens-delaware-home-00077982
“Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his GOP allies insist that no back-room promises were made to land his gavel after 15 frenetic ballots, that no plum committee spots, precise spending cuts, or debt limit strategy were guaranteed in a quid pro quo. Agreements and goals were reached with conservatives who initially withheld their votes from the speaker, GOP leaders say, but nothing was formalized in writing.”
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“One McCarthy holdout, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), bluntly told Fox News when asked “what did you get” that he would join the influential GOP Steering Committee “as Speaker McCarthy’s designee.”
McCarthy also informed members that the House would take its first-ever vote this Congress on a contentious national sales tax bill that Georgia Republicans — including McCarthy dissenter Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) — have pushed for decades.
“That was part of the negotiation. The 20 conservatives who were holding out, one of the things that they wanted was to see it come to the floor for a vote,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) said.”
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“Another McCarthy promise was to diversify the membership on coveted House panels, which in practice means adding more Freedom Caucus members and other conservatives. That has begun to happen: Four speaker-race holdouts — Clyde, Donalds, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) — were awarded spots on prime committees”
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“Clyde stressed: “There’s no secret rules addendum. There’s just an agreement.”
The rumored existence of a binding secret document, however, prompted multiple GOP lawmakers to approach their leaders about it, texting each other in search of the missing paper.”
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“Some House Republicans argue that the most divisive of the concessions floating around are “aspirational” — particularly on issues like spending and the debt limit, which would need to get buy-in from the Democratic Senate and White House to go anywhere.”
https://www.vox.com/2023/1/7/23539605/north-korea-nuclear-kim-jong-un-united-states-south-korea
“For decades, evidence had amassed that the widespread use of antibiotics to help chickens, pigs, and cattle grow faster — and survive the crowded conditions of factory farms — was causing bacteria to mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. By 2009, US agriculture companies were buying up two-thirds of what are termed medically important antibiotics — those used in human medicine. This in turn has made those precious, lifesaving drugs less effective for people.
Over time, once easily treatable human infections, like sepsis, urinary tract infections, and tuberculosis, became harder or sometimes impossible to treat. A foundational component of modern medicine was starting to crumble. But it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the FDA finally took the basic steps of requiring farmers to get veterinary prescriptions for antibiotics and banning the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster — steps that some European regulators had taken a decade or more prior.”
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“according to Matthew Wellington of the Public Interest Research Group, the FDA’s reforms went after the low-hanging fruit, and they didn’t go nearly far enough. Now, in a concerning course reversal, antibiotic sales for use in livestock ticked back up 7 percent from 2017 to 2021, per a new FDA report. The chicken industry, which had led the pack in reducing antibiotic use on farms, bought 12 percent more antibiotics in 2021 than in 2020.”
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“In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed over 1.2 million people, including 35,000 Americans, and more than 3 million others died from diseases where antibiotic resistance played a role — far more than the global toll of HIV/AIDS or malaria, leading the World Health Organization to call antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.””
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“The FDA and the US food industry have proven that they can make progress on the issue — but to keep antibiotics working, they need to do a lot more. That will require them to tackle beef and pork, two of the more stubborn and complex sectors of America’s meat system that just can’t seem to quit antibiotics, since doing so could demand substantive changes to how animals are farmed for food.”
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“In the early 2000s, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken producer Perdue Farms began efforts to wean its birds off antibiotics, which it achieved in 2016 by changing chickens’ diets and replacing antibiotics with vaccines and probiotics. At first, chicken raised without antibiotics cost 50 percent more, but the company says it has since been able to all but close the cost differential.
In the mid-2010s, while Perdue was making progress, activists leveraged the momentum and successfully convinced McDonald’s to source chicken raised without medically important antibiotics. Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest poultry producer, then committed to reducing antibiotic use, contributing to a “domino effect” in which producers and restaurants made further pledges to reduce antibiotics in poultry, said Wellington.
By 2020, a little over half of America’s 9 billion chickens farmed for meat were raised without antibiotics, according to an industry survey.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.”
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“Chickens are slaughtered at just six or seven weeks old, so the chance they’ll get sick is lower than pigs, who are slaughtered at six months old, or cattle, slaughtered at around three years of age.
The chicken industry is also vertically integrated, meaning a company like Tyson or Perdue controls virtually every link in the supply chain, so making big changes like cutting out antibiotics is easier than in the more decentralized supply chain of beef. For example, the typical steer will change hands several times before slaughter, going from a breeder to pasture grazing to a feedlot, all of which make it harder to coordinate an antibiotic-free regimen. In the last few months of their life cattle are also fed a high-grain diet that they aren’t adapted to digest, which increases the chance they’ll develop a liver abscess, a condition that’s prevented with — you guessed it — antibiotics.”
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“The pork sector, like poultry, is also vertically integrated, but the industry has largely opposed animal welfare, environmental, and antibiotic reforms. Antibiotics in pig production shot up 25 percent from 2017 to 2021.
There’s also no pork or beef giant that’s taken the antibiotic-free leap like Perdue did for chicken.”
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“Aside from outright banning the routine use of medically important antibiotics to prevent disease, Wellington said he’d like to see the FDA take three actions: set a target of reducing antibiotic use by 50 percent by the end of 2025 (based on 2010 levels); publish data on antibiotic use, not just sales; and limit the duration of antibiotic courses for farmed animals.
An FDA spokesperson said specific reduction targets weren’t possible because the agency doesn’t know how many antibiotics farmers are using: “We cannot effectively monitor antimicrobial use without first putting a system in place for determining [a] baseline and assessing trends over time.” The agency right now only collects sales data, and it’s been exploring a voluntary public-private approach to collect and report real-world use data.”
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“here’s a lot to learn from the Europeans: Denmark, the continent’s second-largest pork producer, has become the de facto case study in how to wean Big Meat off antibiotics. In the early 1990s, it started phasing out antibiotics in pigs with little impact on the industry. From 1992 to 2008, antibiotic use per pig fell by over 50 percent, and while pig mortality went up in the short term, by 2008 it had dropped back to near-1992 levels.”
“The Teamsters, the union in this case, allegedly timed a 2017 strike so that it would begin after some of Glacier Northwest’s mixing trucks were already filled with concrete, forcing the company’s non-union employees to race to dispose of this material before it hardened in the trucks. But the company was able to remove this wet concrete from the trucks before they were damaged, and there are a wealth of cases establishing that workers may strike even if doing so will cause some of their employer’s product to spoil.
In one case, for example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a kind of quasi-court that hears disputes between unions and employers — sided with milk truck drivers who struck, even though their strike risked spoiling the milk before it was delivered to customers. Another case, handed down by a federal appeals court, reached a similar conclusion regarding striking cheese workers.
That said, there are also some cases establishing that workers may not walk off the job at a time that could result in truly egregious damage to their employer’s business. In one such case, for example, a federal appeals court ruled that foundry workers who work with molten lead could not abruptly walk off the job and leave the lead in a state where it could melt the employer’s facilities or injure other workers.
In any event, the Supreme Court’s decision in San Diego Trades Council v. Garmon (1959) lays out the process that employers must use if they believe their workers timed a strike so recklessly that the union should be held liable. In nearly all cases, the employer must first obtain a ruling from the NLRB establishing that their workers’ strike was not protected by federal law. Only then may they file a lawsuit against the union.
The employer in Glacier Northwest, however, wants the Supreme Court to water down Garmon considerably, potentially enough to render that decision toothless.
If that happens, it would be a tremendous blow to workers. One important reason the Garmon process exists is that it shields unions from lawsuits that could drain their finances and discourage workers from exercising their right to strike — after all, that right means very little if well-moneyed employers can bombard unions with lawsuits the union cannot afford to litigate.”
“While it is true that the president’s party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these “asterisk elections,” thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day. It wasn’t until the fall that I revised my expectations from a “red wave” to a “red ripple.”
My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an “asterisk election” actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the president’s party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the president’s party lost fewer than 10 House seats — so what happened in 2022 isn’t that rare. I also neglected to remember that the president’s party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time — way too frequently to count them out.”